Chapter 33
CHAPTER
I knew you could do it.
Steeler’s smug voice was loitering right outside the wall of my mind by the time I got back to my room, my hands rummaging hastily through all my drawers for a bottle or container I could put Dyonisia’s single strand of hair in for safekeeping.
I didn’t waste time getting to the question that seared on the tip of my tongue as my fingers speared through all the little black pearls in my nightstand—Steeler continued to give me one at the end of every week, and I always accepted it. For my tally, of course.
“Why is my innate power able to surpass the effects of the pills in that Testing Center?” Nobody else was in the room at the moment, not even Willa, so I didn’t care that I was speaking aloud as if to an invisible person. “Is it… is my power trying to take shape?”
A deep, sharp thrill shot through my chest at the thought that maybe this was it. Maybe, if I stopped the pills altogether, my magic would explode into form and I would finally get to find out what it was. Maybe even use it against Dyonisia.
Steeler’s voice was hesitant in my head.
It takes a catastrophic event for a faerie’s power to take shape.
I scoffed. “Falling into a bed of leeches is a catastrophic event.”
No. Steeler shook his head inside mine. Falling into a bed of leeches is triggering, sure—just like drinking bascale or getting branded is.
But not enough for your power to do more than throw a tantrum.
For it to actually burst into shape, you’d have to endure something traumatizing beyond repair.
Something that wrenches out your lungs and heartstrings, knots them together, and stuffs them back in like a life-ending punch to the gut.
One you can’t straighten from unless your power springs to life and helps you back up.
I paused with my hand still in the drawer, surrounded by pearls.
That’s weirdly descriptive.
I tried to not let myself wonder about Steeler’s own burst into power. How he’d said it had happened right after he’d left me on that beach…
In my mind, he gave a careful, casual shrug. It’s textbook. Some faeries in Sorronia will purposely put themselves through a catastrophe if their power hasn’t matured by their mid-twenties.
I wrinkled my nose at that thought—of someone harming themselves for power. But whatever those normal faeries did in Sorronia, it was clear I was doing the opposite here in this dome: purposely suppressing my innate power’s tantrums.
Except those tantrums had broken through that suppressant every time I was in the Testing Center now. Maybe not to take shape, exactly, but to rage and kick and whirl at… something. I just didn’t know what.
Steeler’s voice grazed along the wall of my mind.
I was always scared that one of our powers—mine or Terrin’s, Garvis’s or the twins’—would break through the pill’s suppressant like yours have.
I always told them not to drink any alcohol, even if it wasn’t bascale.
Not to eat any funny foods or take any suspicious medicine in case it tipped them over the edge of what the pills can contain.
But nothing ever happened to us. My fear was just paranoia—until you.
A pause that felt like a breath of star-riddled darkness.
Whatever’s brewing inside, he said finally, must be stronger than any of ours.
I went quiet for so long that my knuckles turned white around the drawer handle.
Rayna?
“It’s just that…” I straightened with the strand of hair still pinched between my fingers. “How do you stand it, not knowing what your magic will be? Isn’t there some kind of… I don’t know, seer faerie who could tell me?”
I didn’t want to be like the queen or Dyonisia, with an antipower that stole or suppressed other magic. I wanted my power to help or uplift or even create in some way. Wanted it to help the world, not harm it.
There are plenty of seers in Sorronia, Steeler mused, but you’d have to pay them. And cross the ocean, of course.
“Well, couldn’t you just Walk me there?”
His thoughts flashed through me: if I was Dyonisia’s daughter, he wouldn’t take me within a hundred miles of the faerie realm where the queen would have my head on a dinner plate.
“Right,” I grumbled. “I might be the exiled princess’s scary heir and all that. When can we get this hair test over with again?”
In nothing more than a stutter of shadow and light, Steeler appeared by the door with a little glass vial in his hand.
“Right now, if you’d like.”
“What are you doing?” I tried to smooth the shock out of my features, glancing at the cracks beneath the door and between the windows. “You can’t just materialize in my actual room, Steeler. What if someone walks right in?”
“Well, then, I supposed I’d just have to Walk right back out.”
His eyes traveled the length of my body—not to appreciate my skin, I realized with a sudden surge of embarrassment, but to assess the swollen, elongated leech marks peppering my arms and legs.
A crease of worry knotted between his brows, but he didn’t comment on the marks. He just uncorked the vial and held it out.
Trying to swallow that absurd sense of self-consciousness, I marched forward and dropped the midnight-black strand inside.
“Perfect. Now give me one of yours and I’ll take this to Barberro right away.
” Steeler nodded at my mess of curls. I assumed Barberro was the faerie with the power of Magnification who would be testing the similarities between our hair strands, but something about the wording of that sentence made me pause.
“Wait a second.” I stepped back, out of Steeler’s reach. “I want to be there when he makes his assessment.”
I needed to hear the words come from this faerie’s lips. That Dyonisia was truly my mother, and that the entirety of Sorronia wanted me dead for my veins that ran with a rebel’s blood.
Steeler looked at me as if I’d spoken monkey gibberish.
“Rayna, I already told you I’m not taking you onto that ship.”
“Then Walk Barberro to the island just like you Walk the others,” I argued, stepping even further out of his reach until we were on opposite ends of the room: him with his back still to the door and me with my back to my own bed.
Not that the distance would matter in the end.
If Steeler wanted to, he could materialize next to me, pluck one of my hairs off, and leave.
He tore his free hand through his hair in obvious frustration.
“Barberro is oath-bound to the queen like most of the others, Rayna. If you are Dyonisia’s daughter, he will still have to try to kill you… even if he was the gentlest, most peaceful male alive. Which he’s not.” Steeler dropped his hand. “So excuse me if—”
Before he could finish that sentence, I whipped out one of my throwing knives and sent it careening through the air—right over his head, missing his scalp by half an inch…
Where it lodged into the wood of the door behind him.
Guess all of Jagaros’s lessons had paid off, after all.
The smoky quartz of Steeler’s eyes widened at me for just a moment.
Unable to stifle the smirk I could feel rising to my lips, I stalked forward to stand on my tiptoes, reach over his shoulder, and wrench the blade out of the wood.
“I think I can handle myself against one little faerie man whose only power is that he has really good eyesight.”
Steeler didn’t even glance at the knife.
His free hand shot out to clamp around my closed fist, holding the weapon in place between us while shadows dropped like curtains over his pupils and heat rose in my chest.
“And I think you’re getting rather cocky with that thing, little hurricane.”
Wrapping his arm around my backside to lock me into place, he brought our joined hands closer to my neck until I felt the cold flat of the blade lifting my chin. Forcing me to look at him.
An unnecessary act. I was already looking at him. Dead-on.
And I huffed out a laugh right into his face.
“You’re trying to scare me into changing my mind, but guess what, Steeler?
” I leaned into the knife, swelling with satisfaction when he immediately drew the blade away to avoid cutting me.
“I’m not scared of you. I’m often infuriated by you, constantly frustrated with you, still angry at you, but I’m not scared of you.
And I’m coming with you to give my own damn strand of hair to this Barberro guy because I know you won’t let him hurt me. ”
Steeler’s lips parted in surprise, and my fingers twitched with the sudden desire to touch his fangs. To trace their sharp points and perhaps imagine what they would feel like against my neck.
“Pssst. Sorry to interrupt, but you might want to wrap up your… staring contest?”
I jumped as something furry and gray wiggled from a crack in the baseboards.
“Willa!” I turned to the mouse, a blush squirming down into my belly at the position she’d caught me in—pressed up against Steeler with only a knife between us. “It’s nice to—what did you say?”
“You might want to wrap up your staring contest with the wanted fugitive who’s definitely not supposed to be on the island, let alone this room.
” If a mouse could smirk, Willa was doing a damn good job at it: one corner of her mouth pinched upward, revealing half a buck-toothed smile as she assessed us both from head to toe.
“Because Cilia’s coming upstairs with Mitzi in five, four, three… ”
I whipped my gaze back toward Steeler just as Cilia’s and Mitzi’s chattering voices did indeed reach us from the outside hallway.
“Don’t you even think about leaving without me.”
Something pained and strangled seem to overtake the exasperation in his expression.
“Two,” Willa urged. “One…”
Just as the doorknob began to turn, Steeler disappeared.
And I disappeared along with him.